In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Mark Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: . . . >True story: when I began working for my current employer, there was a >guy there doing some work with a spreadsheet. He was given two weeks to . [tale of atrocity and woe] . . >cell formulae. The rationale behind this is that VBA is too hard for >most people to understand, whereas formulae are easier to understand. . . . Well *that* certainly made my morning unpleasant.
I think the point to take away has something to do with maturity or judgment or one of those other difficult qualities. Some of this stuff--"formulae are easy to understand", "you don't need programmers, you just enter what you want the machine to do", "we'll wage war on terrorists by *becoming* terrorists", "Micro- soft has spent more on 'security' than any other vendor"--*sounds* like a useful guide to action. A hard part of our responsibility, though, is articulating for decision-makers that these superficial simplificities truly are superficial, and that they lead to monstrous costs that are hard for "civilians" to anticipate. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list